


Of Candles and Children

by stele3



Series: The Tether Series [10]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: F/M, Gen, Multi, Philosophy, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:07:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23691334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stele3/pseuds/stele3
Summary: It pained her at first to have disrupted such peace and joy. And—she was jealous. Not of John’s pleasure with Flint and Mr. Hamilton, but of her lack. It has been a long, long time since Madi felt any kind of contentment that was not tempered by pain and blood, and worse, she had not noticed its absence from her life until confronted by that scene in the orchard.Yet like a boat reorienting to its ballast after a high wave, they all seem to be settling into a new accord, as tender as unfurling leaves from the stem of a plant.-o-Many thanks to ladywrites on Tumblr for the sensitivity read.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw & Madi, Madi/John Silver
Series: The Tether Series [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/924627
Comments: 11
Kudos: 72





	Of Candles and Children

### ~Philadelphia, November 1723

Madi is reading in her window seat when someone knocks on the doorframe of her room. She looks up, still half-trapped in a world of farting demons and allegorical punishments.

John Silver smiles at her. She has left the door standing open, as she is still unaccustomed to that particular aspect of Christian houses. On the island, the most privacy one might expect was a cloth hung over the doorway of the medicine woman’s quarters while inside, a mother toiled through birth. Resources had been scarce enough not to waste wood and labor on frivolities.

After she left the island, Madi had learned to both appreciate and hate doors. They separate and imprison, but they also protect. It all depends on which side of the door you stand when it closes.

Here, in this house, she has noticed that only the Jewess keeps her door closed with any consistency, but she suspects it is for reasons inherent only to the twisted pathways of Rebekah’s mind. For her part Madi very much hopes that her days of needing a locked door between herself and the world are behind her.

“It’s gone dark,” Silver says, drawing her thoughts back to him. “How are you still reading?”

“There is a little light.” Madi can read by moonlight, and has, when even a small flame might betray her position. She gestures to the large, thick candle in John’s hand that casts its glow on his face. “Have you come to bring me more?”

“If you’ll permit it, yes.” He stays in the doorway until she beckons him to enter. He, too, is different, in ways that she is still learning. There is his relationship with Captain Flint and Mr. Hamilton, but she has always been aware of Silver’s deep, strangled obsession with Flint. At first she had feared that Flint would use that obsession to his advantage; instead, of course, the opposite came to pass. That they have found their way back to one another, here, is no great surprise either, nor was she especially scandalized to find them all entangled in the garden together.

What _had_ shocked her was the very real pleasure on Silver’s face, the happiness and joy that had suffused his whole body, even scarred and grown thin as it was.

It pained her at first to have disrupted such peace and joy. And—she was jealous. Not of John’s pleasure with Flint and Mr. Hamilton, but of her lack. It has been a long, long time since Madi felt any kind of contentment that was not tempered by pain and blood, and worse, she had not noticed its absence from her life until confronted by that scene in the orchard.

Yet like a boat reorienting to its ballast after a high wave, they all seem to be settling into a new accord, as tender as unfurling leaves from the stem of a plant. 

Laying a ribbon in the book to mark her place, Madi sets it aside and swings her legs out of the window seat. She watches as Silver moves about her room, lighting candles as he goes. He says, “Marielena is preparing a feast of some kind for next week. Apparently, they spent some time in the Virginia colony before they traveled further north, and they there adopted a holiday of thanksgiving to celebrate the harvest. If you have any requests or contributions to put forth in the way of food, I suggest you do so promptly.”

She says, “Your people have a day of feasting soon, do they not? I cannot remember the name.”

“Ah,” he says after a brief pause. Still he is so hesitant with himself, and avoids her eyes as he continues, “Sukkot is already passed. Rebekah built a rather elaborate hut out in the orchard.”

The hut. Madi remembers that much: a simple structure open to the sky, decorated with leaves and branches of very particular kinds. When she was a child, her father had brought a large group of freemen to the camp who had taken over the ship in which they were imprisoned and managed to sail it just south of Port Royal. It was by chance that her father traveled that way on business for his Guthrie masters.

They had not been Ashanti or Yoruba, but her father’s camp had never cared about such things. Still, they had kept themselves apart, spoke their own tongue, and kept their own customs as well, which had piqued Madi’s curiosity. More than once her mother had steered her back to camp with admonishments not to pester their visitors, but in truth they did not seem to mind. When most of the group had moved south towards Brazil—where dwelled a larger number of their people, the journey back across the sea being a prohibitive venture, as it was for them all—a few had stayed behind.

They had still been there, fourteen years later, when John Silver returned to the encampment following a successful raid, with a swagger in his step and an incongruous lemon in his pocket for her. Looking back, Madi doubts that he meant the gift to have any significance beyond a private joke, up until the moment his eyes slid sideways, landed on the small makeshift hut beside the river, and stayed there.

He had not gone down to the hut. There were too many pirates around eager for his attention, none more so than his captain. But when she asked, he had answered.

“I have a gift.” Silver produces a small jar of very familiar white oil.

“For a moment I thought you might have brought me another lemon. Is this your way of telling me that I should tend to my hair?”

“No. Only an offer.” Silver rubs his fingers together in a gesture that, too, is familiar.

Longing blossoms in Madi’s chest. Once, she had burned it to the soil and stamped out the ashes; but its roots run deep in her. Sitting back, she beckons him over. “I will thank you for the help.”

There is a vanity in the corner of the room; this chamber must have been intended for a woman. From what Flint has told her, Captain Avery’s woman. Whoever she was, she must have possessed some vanity of the less-literal kind, for there is a rather sizable mirror of fine make, with decorative curves on its sides. The glass has warped some and blackened at the edges, but still shows a dim reflection. Madi sits in front of it and unties the thin strips of cloth that keep her hair in place on top of her head.

As she does so, she asks, “Where did you find your gift?”

Silver leans against the wall nearby and shrugs. “It wasn’t so difficult. The years of peace in Nassau have increased trade with the colonies.” His mouth twists and he watches her in the mirror; but Madi finds no bitterness in her heart to hear of Nassau. Too many years of fighting have numbed her to the memory of what she had hoped to do in that place. He continues, “And of course the trees grow in La Florida, though the Spanish have yet to build anything remotely resembling a trade route in that swamp. I’m rather amazed they haven’t all perished from malaria by now.”

“There is a grass that keeps away the ẹfọn. It grows in my people’s land and sometimes the medicine people use it to conjure the dead. They have started to plant it in La Florida.”

“Have they? I shouldn’t be surprised—I imagine quite a number of people came to you from the Florida colony and good King Charles.”

Parting the locs of her hair into quarters, Madi glances at him in the mirror; his gaze is on her bared neck. She feels it like a prickle on her skin. “Will you do the back?” she asks, and her voice is hushed to her own ears.

He sets the small jar of oil on the edge of the vanity while Madi retrieves the small comb, carved from whalebone, that has served her all these many years. It quickly becomes apparent that he does remember. The first time he helped her with this, she had been a princess and he a quartermaster: she’d looked up from her mirror to find him watching from his place in her bed, curiosity sparking his gaze. Later, at the inn in Bristol, he’d been transparently eager to please her and just as equally ashamed of his eagerness; she had reluctantly accepted his help out of convenience, or at least that is how she justified it to herself at the time.

In truth she knows that she will never not thrill to the idea of having John Silver’s hands on her, and nothing, not betrayal or rage or the advancing of both their years, can tear that truth from her.

She watches him in the mirror. He appears entirely focused on his task, carefully dabbing the roots of each loc before rolling them between his palms until it just barely tugs at her scalp. The movements are second nature to her: she has worn her hair this way several times in her life, most consistently in recent years when necessity demanded that it be tied back and out of the way. More than once she has considered cutting all of it off, as is common among the Windward Maroons of Jamaica. Her mother, though, cautioned her not to change her appearance too suddenly or drastically. Her people must be able to recognize her, and describe her to others in a way that makes her recognizable to them; and conversely, if she wears her hair a certain way for years, she will be known to the British as a woman who wears her hair a certain way, and to cut it then might prove the best disguise of all.

They pass the comb and the oil back and forth. Silver breaks the silence first. “May I ask how your mother died?”

“A fever. It was brought by Maroons from a Dutch merchant ship and swept through the camp. Many grew sick but only a few died. She was one.”

“I am sorry. When did it happen?”

She has to stop and think a moment. The last two years have passed in a blur of fighting and surviving. “I was on Jamaica when it happened, in the spring. It was…a year and six months ago.”

His fingertips press lightly to her scalp. “What a terribly ordinary way to die for such an extraordinary woman.”

Madi finishes her quarter more quickly than he and sits watching him. A coil winds tighter in her breast, a poisoned root that she has avoided for years. She would do so now…but it is Silver with her here. If she cannot tell him, then who?

“I knew she was sick,” she confesses. “I did not go to her. There were reasons…Olabisi had made friends with a man at the Sutton Estate, and they planned a rebellion.”

“Christ, Olabisi’s still alive?”

“She was when I left. They had over five hundred people at the Sutton Estate that would need food and shelter and training, if we were able to rescue them. They needed my help. I told myself that she would have wanted me to help them rather than play nursemaid to her. But I think…I made many excuses not to return to her. I never forgave her for siding with you and Julius to create the treaty in Nassau.”

His eyes flick to hers, then away again, but she knows him—and this face—far too well. In Bristol he had looked like this when he woke every morning, before he put on the mask he used to shield himself from the world.

Reaching back, she catches his wrist. “I should have gone to her. There are many things I regret. Not my beliefs—I fought for what I thought was right and I do not regret that, even if it created a wound between her and I. But in not going to her, I hurt myself again. It was the same when I left you on the road to Southhampton.”

It is as close to an apology as she can give. They both lost so much that terrible day, but they are still alive. The same cannot be said for those who had taken refuge in their cellar, whom Silver betrayed in exchange for her life.

Silver says nothing and after a moment they both resume tending to her hair.

“Will any of those living amongst the native tribes here make their way south?” he asks.

“I do not yet know. I have spoken to a few of them of the possibility. I am concerned…they want for a leader to guide them. Such communities as this do not usually survive without. No, I am not thinking of myself. But I do not think you will be much more relieved by the alternative.”

Young Erik is…young. Much younger than her father when he first took the great work of king and keeper upon himself. He has further disadvantages: he never learned his mother’s language—though Madi has begun to teach him—and his lame foot…though on that score, it may prove to be a gift. In the Bristol inn, Madi saw firsthand the way that Christian men so readily overlook the lame and those they mistake to be physically weaker than themselves. They had sneered at John, treated him like scum, and he had borne it with a placid, fixed smile.

What a wretched life they had together in Bristol. When Silver had first come to her with the idea—Bristol was the largest slave port in England and an inn would provide the perfect cover for them to hide those they could rescue—Madi had thought only of the work that would surely occupy most of her time. Of course, she gave some consideration to how she would feel living in such close proximity to Silver; but with her rage at the time simmering white-hot, she had thought herself immune to him. Indifferent, uncaring.

Oh what a fool she was, for she had completely failed to factor in the misery of _England_ itself. The cold, the damp, the hard stares of Christian men and women that surrounded her daily, all of it contrived to leech at her energy. Worst was the helplessness: more men, women, and children were saved by their little Bristol inn than ever existed in any one Maroon encampment, but she could find no satisfaction when she saw daily the flood of chained bodies pouring off of ships to be sold as base animals.

If she had tamped the coal in her breast, she and Silver might have found comfort in one another. But she had not, still too angry with him, and so they had each suffered alone.

She wonders if he fears a renewal of their miserable state.

“Christ,” he mutters, scowling at her hair even as he rolls the last loc so carefully between his palms. Madi retrieves her scarf and scoops the thin locs away from her neck, winding the fabric around and around the river of her hair.

Silver has stepped away from her and taken a seat on the edge of her bed. He isn’t watching her anymore; he scowls into the near distance, chewing on his lip. Madi finishes wrapping her hair, wipes the comb of excess oil, and replaces the lid of the jar.

“Speak to me,” she says.

He looks at her—first at the back of her head then at the mirror, then again at her face when she turns in the chair to face him. “What should I say?”

“You are troubled. Speak to me and let us see if I cannot lift that trouble.”

“I…don’t want you to have to do that.”

“Then let me share it.”

His strange pale eyes scamper away from her to traverse the room. He asks, “Is it so terrible to want the people I care for to be safe?”

It’s a foolish question to which he already knows the answer. She does not bother. Rebekah was right: none of them will ever truly be safe. The very existence of everyone living under this roof is, in different ways, an affront to those in power, and to pretend otherwise is only ever a fool’s errand on the best days and an insult on the worst.

The people whom Silver loves will never, ever be safe. It is an impossibility. Even Thomas Hamilton, son of an Earl and Lord Proprietor, has made himself hated by civilization and _gods_ , gods, if she had been born thus, how differently she would have lived that life. How carefully. She would have been upright and beyond reproach; she would have stifled every personal desire. She would have strangled herself for the sake of how many pieces she could have moved, how many lives she could have saved, and is it wrong to be grateful that she was not born thus? Is it wrong to be glad that she may finally loose herself from the shackles of duty? She was only ever a small piece upon the board. No. She does not bother answering these doubts.

Instead she asks herself why he would bother voicing such a question.

“I cannot forgive you,” she says. “But I have come to accept the absence of that clemency between us.”

“I see.”

“No, you do not. I spent years holding my rage in my heart, and it ate at me. It was only after I believed you dead that I truly perceived the cost of what that rage had consumed. I want…I need to put it aside. You are not the man that I believed you to be at the start of our acquaintance—the no-good pirate king.” That familiar refrain brings a smile to both their faces. “For years I blamed you for not being that man, but I find that I no longer care.”

Still he misinterprets her, unwilling to hope. She reaches across that divide of misunderstanding and pain to offer him her hand. After a moment he takes it and their intertwined fingers hang in the space between them.

“Without clemency, without forgiveness…can there be any way to make things right between us?” She can see how much it costs him to ask: he holds himself as if wounded already, braced against an anticipated blow.

She turns her hand over in his loose grasp. The oil makes their fingers slip together. “I do not think,” she says slowly, “that there is anything to be made right anymore. Perhaps I should hold tighter to my beliefs; perhaps that is a failing on my part. But I am tired. I have been fighting for so long. My cause was a worthy one but I am not made of clay and metal, I am flesh and I am still your wife.”

His eyes are so wide and blue, like the sea. Not the dark waters here in Philadelphia but the ocean of her home, of Nassau. “You never?”

There is a ritual to undo a marriage. She knows that he knows it. She shakes her head. “I considered it. I will not lie. But I never did.”

“Forgive me, I am not sure I quite believe you,” Silver says. “Not…that I think you to be lying, but…”

“That I am mistaken?” she prompts. “That I do not know my own mind? Have you ever found that to be true of me in the past?”

“No,” he admits. He will not meet her eye. He stares instead into the space between them.

She crosses it for them both, standing over him and bending low to press their lips together. His body jerks as if dowsed with sudden water and his hands land on her hips, tentative as a pair of birds still uncertain of their perch. She moves closer until the fronts of her thighs press against his knees and wraps her arms around his neck. He has to tilt his head far back to kiss her; it makes her remember the first time he had come to her bed—well, no, the second time, the first had been stillborn—when he’d knelt on the floor and pleasured her with his mouth. Her body flushes hot with the memory.

Madi drinks greedily of his mouth, for she has gone years without. He is not the only man she has ever known—there was a boy in the village when she was young, but that was childish curiosity. In Jamaica there had been a woman who shared her bed, Mayowa, but she had been in grief over losing her husband at the Sutton Estate and their touching had brought simple comfort and relief rather than passion.

Madi, too, had been in grief. She had grieved for two years and across the cold waters of an ocean, from Southhampton all the way to Tortuga, where she had rendezvoused with Julius, who had told her that Silver yet lived.

Never has she felt this desire for anyone else. Before him, she had read the great stories of love with interest and curiosity but a degree of skepticism. It had seemed so improbable that someone could be so taken with love that they cast aside sense. She’d thought it a literary conceit. Even after she had met John Silver and become his wife, she’d held to this belief, up until the moment he stood in her room and told her exactly how he had betrayed her trust in him. Oh, how rage had filled her to the brim.

And yet she had loved him still. This changeling man, this liar, this coward awash with fear. He is everything she should not want, but she _does_ , she does, her body blossoms the way it never has for another.

Silver breaks the kiss first. “Wait, wait just a moment.”

Getting up, he crosses to the door. Distantly Madi hears voices downstairs, which cut off when he pushes the portal shut.

Afterwards they lie together in the dark, still greedy for the touch of skin. Madi relates some of her campaigns in Jamaica, though she cannot speak of the horrors as frankly as she did with Captain Flint. Instead she shares with him the fates of those he came to know in the village. She shows him the burns on her ankles from where the fires of the Sutton Estate had leapt up and bit at her in anger as she fled, the jagged cut hidden on her temple from the butt of a British soldier’s gun, and the new bend in her left small finger where it broke and never healed right.

The candles burn low as he lies back and lets her see all the places where the pox dug its claws into his flesh but did not quite manage to drag his life from him. It pains him, she knows: always he felt his infirmity and called it weakness.

“Thomas and Flint spoke of your illness,” Madi murmurs as she runs a hand over his shoulder. “They said that you tried to take your own life. Is that true?”

He had been lying on his side facing her, but the question drives him into retreat and she finds herself presented with his back. Fortunately she recalls their marriage bed quite well and does not take this as a rejection; instead she draws closer, sliding one arm around him and pulling him back against her.

They lie for a while together as Madi draws soft designs on the skin of his chest and side.

At length, Silver says: “I sailed once with a man named Solomon Little.”

Madi has heard many stories about Solomon Little in the few weeks: Silver has taken to dictating them while Maria-Elena practices her letters and transcribes his words.

They write dreadful things. Horrors befall young Solomon Little at every turn, far beyond what one small child could physically endure, and Silver seems to take a perverse pleasure in inflicting them. Once, Madi had come home to find him sprawled in the doorway between the hall and the front parlor with his back to one side and his foot propped against the other; he was laughing too hard to stand as he dictated a new chapter to Maria-Elena.

“—and the rats, the fucking _rats_.” He broke off at this point to laugh and strike his leg with an open hand. “While little Solomon is tied up in the hold of the ship, the rats—come skittering out of the wood and eat, they eat his, his f-f-f- _foreskin_! The foreskin of his penis!”

Seated at the little writing desk in the parlor, Maria-Elena cringed even as she transcribed Silver’s words. “Is it fore as before, or four after three?”

“Fore as in before, my dear,” Silver told her then added, “Once the rats have eaten his foreskin, they set to nibbling on the toes of his left leg.”

That seems to be a favorite subject: Madi has heard Solomon Little lose his leg at least four different ways since their storytelling began, each more awful than the last. Whenever he truly gets going, Mr. Hamilton cannot stand to be in hearing range and takes himself out on long walks, sometimes with the Jewess Rebekah. Flint is more sanguine; the only time he has made comment was to shrug and say, “Well, at least he’s not lying to _us_.”

Now Silver weaves a new story: “He told me a story from his youth. As a child, Solomon lived in a village of gray sea mist, the sort of place where wind drives the trees sideways and mothers close their curtains at night to hide from the ocean’s unblinking gaze. Solomon’s mother was no exception but the sea called to her boy anyways.

“He would go out alone, fishing in the cove near their house. It was just the two of them, as his father had long since abandoned the family—or perhaps they fled from him, I can’t recall the exact details. As man of the house, little Solomon did his best to bring home fish for the table, but one day he brought something far larger. A man, sea-soaked and clinging to the detritus of a ship. He said that he was a doctor in service to _Le Roi Soliel_ , but that his ship had been attacked by the English and he the only survivor.

“Now, it was custom of this town to turn away all castaways. The war had raged for years around them and lit up the sky at night with distant fires, but so far, they had escaped notice. Solomon, however, was a soft-hearted lad, and he brought the poor wretch home with him. Little did he know that by doing so, he signed the death warrants of his mother and the rest of his town.

“For the doctor came to them sickened with pox, which Solomon had not recognized beneath the dirt and seawater. It raced like wildfire through the town, tumbling his playmates into their sickbeds. And then came the soldiers. You see, the doctor hadn’t escaped an attack, he’d evaded execution. In order to keep the pox from spreading, the Sun-King’s regiments had been tasked with burning the bodies of the infected…even if those bodies still happened to be alive.

“Somehow, by some… _miracle_ of Providence, Solomon had not caught the pox. His mother was not so lucky, and she bade him run and hide underneath his dingy on the shoreline. All day and all night he heard the crack of pistols. The screams of the dying. Smelled their burning flesh. When dawn broke, the soldiers marched out of town—not that there was a town left by then. Solomon emerged from the sand to find his kindness paid back a thousand times in blood.”

He pauses, though it’s clearly not yet the story’s end. In the waiting silence, Madi allows herself to wonder how much of the story is true—what parts of it he endured and which he invented. Perhaps he was the boy he calls by his own name; perhaps he was the doctor; perhaps he was one of the soldiers. Perhaps he was no one at all.

Finally, Silver sighs and rolls onto his back, though he keeps his gaze on the ceiling. “As you can imagine, the story created quite an impression in my mind, such that I desired to avoid bringing down a similar calamity on my own small village. I did not want to die—I think we can agree that if I am nothing else, I am a man determined to survive. But greater than my desire to live was to not serve as the ferryman for others.”

“I understand that desire. I am very glad, though, that your attempt failed.”

He huffs a laugh. Madi rises in the bed, slinging her leg across his hips. She runs her hands up and down his square chest. Her thoughts muddle around and produce a question that surprises her: “Do you know what became of Jim Hawkins?”

If the change in topic disconcerts him, Silver does not show it. His eyebrows lift, as do the corners of his lips. “Little Jamie? Last I heard he’d gone back to the Spyglass Inn with his mother. A sensible lad, I told him to avoid putting on airs and attracting the wrong kind of attention. Why do you ask?”

“I thought of him just now, as you talked of a different child. Before you made his acquaintance—before I saw you with him, I would…not have thought you desired to be a father.”

Silver makes a face. “Has Rebekah been after you again?”

“No.” Well, not directly: they have developed the habit of taking afternoon tea together, during which time they discuss theology at great length. Rebekah seems pleased by this and not at all discouraged that Madi still does not believe in her god. _The talking matters more_ , she said when Madi asked.

She says, “Jim was…he cared for you a great deal.”

 _As you cared for him._ Madi has seen Silver feign sentiment before. When she thought Flint dead and buried on Skeleton Island, she believed for a time that he was incapable of anything but false affections. No expressions of devotion could dissuade her from this belief, as she believed her own judgement to be compromised, and even after she had accepted the sincerity of his love for her, she thought herself an exception.

It was not until she met a tousle-haired urchin on the deck of a stolen ship that she realized how wrong she was. A rope had been tied around the boy’s waist, the other end of which secured him to Silver’s own body; the boy had tugged at it fitfully while he swore at Silver in what Madi later learned was Irish Gaelic.

Madi has seen John Silver cut down a man twice his size while balanced on one leg. She has seen him lash out with dark ferocity at slights. But in the torrent of vitriol from Jim Hawkins, he had merely leaned on his crutch and smiled with surprising fondness.

The darkness made appearances later, whenever little Jim—or “Jamie,” as Silver called him to the boy’s eternal wrath—was even remotely endangered, regardless of whether the boy himself had caused the trouble. Jim Hawkins had the temperament of a feral dog and was just as likely to bite; Madi would have happily thrown him over the side or at least stranded him on a safe island to forestall his meddling. Silver, however, loved him. There is no other word for it. When they first met, Madi had been in Tortuga with Israel Hands gathering them a crew, so she does not know how, why, or when Silver’s attachment to the boy formed. Her only clue came from Ben Gunn, who had frowned and said, “I tink there was something to do with the ship’s captain. He was in with t’other prisoners, but Silver pulled ‘im out and cut his troat himself.”

Madi had never asked for clarification. She had watched Jamie snarl and snap at Silver from the end of a short rope for a fortnight while they retrieved the cache. She had watched Jamie stand very still, his eyes wide, as Silver cut the rope from around his waist and give him his share of the prize with a stern warning to avoid any Spaniards.

When Silver had finished talking, Jamie had burst into tears and flung his arms around Silver’s waist.

Sighing, Silver sits up, propped on his hands. Madi shifts back on his thighs and curls her hands around his sides. “I suppose he reminded me of myself at that age,” he says. “Like him, I believed that enough gold would fix all of my problems.”

“Hm. And yet too often, it creates many more. I hope that Jim has not discovered this lesson for himself, or at least found the teaching less painful.”

“One can hope.” Silver draws one crooked knuckle along the side of her face. “Do you…desire to be a mother?”

She ponders it as she runs her fingers through his hair, stretching the curls out until they spring free and rebound. Will he let her braid _his_ hair? “I do not know. I have not considered it a possibility before I came to this place. But after spending so many years surrounded by death, I understand the argument that Rebekah made. And I think…I know that I want to see you become a father. I think you would be a good one.”

“Really.” Silver does not even try to hide his skepticism.

Madi refuses to be swayed. “Yes, I do. I have been mistaken about you before, but in this I assure you, I am quite certain.”

“I hope you’ll forgive me for not entirely sharing your confidence.”

“That is all right,” she tells him, leaning close to kiss her smile onto his face. “I think we have established that I possess enough belief for the both of us.”

-o-

Silver spends the night in her bed. Waking with him is a pleasure almost as great as anything that came before: in sleep he is lax and unguarded in a way wholly unlike the face he shows to the sun. Madi lies beside him, careful not to move and to keep her breath deep and even, so that she may study his face at her leisure.

Eventually she must rise, and he stirs as she slips from the bed. In the gray light that passes for morning in these northern lands, his hair looks so dark against the white sheets of her bed. Even his eyes look black.

Leaning down, Madi cups his cheekbone with her hand and kisses him. “A pę ko to jęun, ki ję ibaję.”

Silver scoffs against her lips. “Is that meant sarcastically? Because I will absolutely rise and make you breakfast—”

“No. Sleep. I will return tomorrow.”

His expression falls somewhat. He has not protested her involvement in this venture, not aloud; she knows him too well, though, and she feels it within his breast as surely as her own.

She remembers standing on a shoreline, years past, and waiting for Silver to emerge from the rabble of pirates clawing their way onto a beach. She had known he was alive: she had felt a strange squeezing sensation all about her, pressing inwards, she had felt her heart pounding, and she _knew_ —

“I will be with Flint,” she tells him, recalling the presence at her side on that beach.

That soothes him. Somewhere buried deep in his love for Flint is the reverence of a child for his father, or an adherent to his god: he loves, and he believes, and so it must be so.

She passes out of their closed door— _their_ door, she catches herself, _theirs_. Standing at the top of the shadowy stairs, she laughs softly at herself. How quickly she has woven herself into this new adventure called _domesticity_.

Downstairs, a fire is lit in the kitchen. The city outside the walls of their— _their—_ home is still and silent; inside are stirrings of life. Here is Erik, nervously drumming his fingers on the polished wood of his new crutch. Captain Flint carved him a new one from pale wood; it is not elegant, as a slave boy in possession of a fine cane would draw notice, but it is exactly fitted to him. It has not escaped her notice that Captain Flint expresses his love in the form of gifts, and she wonders how he interpreted the books that she brought him all the way from Jamaica.

Here is that man himself, carefully sipping at a steaming cup. He smiles and presents her with her own, which she holds in both her palms. She has always been careful to speak eloquently and avoid pejoratives—her father’s tutelage: the world must have no help in questioning her intellect—but were she to indulge, she would declare that it is _fucking cold_ in Philadelphia. How men have traveled even further North into icy wastelands is beyond her comprehension, much less _why_.

As if on cue, Maria-Elena appears at her shoulder and hands her a thick shawl of a material that Madi does not recognize, all while Maria-Elena continues to lecture Erik on a subject that has escaped Madi’s understanding. Madi fumbles with the shawl and an expression of gratitude that goes completely unnoticed as Maria-Elena disappears back into the kitchen.

Flint catches her eye and smiles, the lines of his face folding tenderly. Before she came here she never would have recognized the wrinkles of his brow and mouth, but there must have been some time in his life when he knew joy every day.

He takes the cup from her so that she may unfold the shawl and wrap it around her shoulders. It is warm inside, as if Maria-Elena heated it beside the fire.

She, Flint, and Erik leave the house shortly, with bundles prepared for them by Maria-Elena. Madi takes the one intended for Flint; his face twists but he lets her. They walk behind him. It does not bother her as much as when she played this role with Silver, perhaps because she has someone to walk beside. Erik has improved in Yoruba and Twi; in return he is teaching her Dutch, and they pass their journey across town in practice.

The shop that Flint and Erik share is simple. The sign above the door and window says “CARPENTRY.” The window, she notes, is glass but thickly made and cross-hatched quite thoroughly. Someone seeking to break in would be wiser to attempt the door.

Once inside, Flint gratefully drops the role of master and shows her their operation. Past the tools of their trade and the furnishings they produce for the ton are parcels of food, raw cloth and a sewing kit, and dozens of other items that Madi recognizes intimately as being that which she and others on the Maroon island desired and longed for.

“<Good>,” she says to Erik in Yoruba. “<This is good.>”

The parcels are placed in the frame of a large bed, which Flint and Erik hammer shut. The bed, Flint explains, is a legitimate order on the part of Thomas’ acquaintance Mr. Sauer, who has proven a most devoted ally indeed and will be providing them lodging tonight after their long journey. His farm in Lancaster is south of the Delaware encampment but close enough to provide a believable alibi. Should the encampment prove a viable long-term settlement, Madi has an eye towards using the farm as a base of operations and an avenue towards freedom, if only Mr. Sauer, too, can be persuaded to act the role of master and purchase slaves to tend his fields. If those slaves subsequently disappear, well, better that he earn the reputation of a harsh master who cares little for the lives of his property than reveal their true destination. But those possibilities have not yet found stable ground from which to grow; first she must see what awaits her at the encampment today.

Loading the bed into the cart takes a good deal of strength, and they dare not involve anyone else in the endeavor who might hear the thud of certain items moving about inside the bed frame. They manage and set out West from the city. Once they pass its gates, the road grows decidedly rougher. It is wholly unlike the sway of a ship navigating ocean swells. More than once Madi finds her teeth clacking together painfully as their wheels encounter a rock or a hole in the road, and Flint must sense her discomfort, for he begins to murmur warnings before they encounter such obstacles.

They ride on for several hours. The bitter cold of morning gradually gives way to what Flint calls an unseasonably warm day for early November; it still feels bitterly cold to Madi, who pulls her shawl up over her head. The further they travel from Philadelphia, the fewer homes they encounter, until it is just them, their horses, and the passing trees. Flint has procured a musket and a pistol, which he assures her is mostly precautionary; when she inquires about bandits, he smiles grimly and shakes his head. “Mostly of the four-legged variety. There are wolves and mountain lions, and bears.”

Of course, Madi has heard of such creatures and read about them, but never seen any in person. The folktales of England created vivid images of terror in her mind, and she catches herself nervously scanning the trees around her. They have gone barren in the cold, casting their leaves downward. Their branches clutch at the sky like shriveled hands.

For his part, Erik appears completely blithe to both the bumpy journey and the possibility of being ravaged by wild animals, and actually falls asleep lying down on top of the bedframe in the back of the cart. Flint casts him a fond, exasperated look. “The benefits of youth.”

“Did you do the same, when you were his age?”

“Not many long trips by cart when I was young. The colonies, you will find, are much larger than England. I do recall on more than one occasion falling asleep in the bottom of my grandfather’s small fishing boat, strewn about with the carcasses of dead and dying fish and an inch of brackish water soaking my clothes.”

Madi finds it rather hard to picture him thus: Flint had always seemed a man not unlike the Minerva of Roman myth, who sprang fully-formed from the skull of a god. Now she knows this to be deliberate, that he created the persona of Flint from the sea foam; now she has seen him aged, and so logic must dictate that once he was young. But the idea of it, of a young boy curled at his grandfather’s feet, fast asleep, makes her strangely sad. She imagines that boy is soft and sweet, and she does not wish for him to face the horrors that wait in his future.

By now it is mid-morning and Flint produces a canteen that he offers to her. Its sides are still warm; when she drinks, the taste surprises her. It is sweet and spicy at once. “Apple cider,” Flint explains. “With Marielena’s own flair. I don’t think she can resist the temptation to put chilies in everything she makes, but at the moment we could use the heat.”

Madi agrees. She drinks deep then wipes her mouth, handing the canteen back to him. “Why did you not pursue your grandfather’s profession?”

He considers his response as he guides the cart through a puddle that looks to contain some ice. Madi shivers resentfully. “Well. I imagine there were a number of reasons that I could list, and have over the years. The nearness of poverty and with it, starvation—one bad season of fishing could spell his end. The back-breaking work that left him half-crippled at too young an age. I think, though, that you know enough of the Navy to guess that neither starvation nor work could be wholly avoided in its service.” He waits for her nod to continue, “So I must confess the sin of many an Englishman before me: the appeal of a uniform and rank to call my own. The resentment of those who looked down on my grandfather, and the ambition to be their better.”

Madi frowns, turning that over in her mind. “Some time ago, Thomas and I spoke on the subject of war, and the means by which the wealthy of England deceive the poor into lining their pockets.”

Flint puts his head back and laughs. He is…not unimpressive to her. She wonders if this is more of Silver, living inside of her chest and loving on her behalf. She does not resent his influence in this regard.

“That sounds like Thomas,” he says. “Well? I expect you have notes to share on his opinions?”

“He said there were three primary means by which the poor are enticed to fight: the promise of a better life, the fervor of false patriotism, or the exercise of their own violence. I presume you were the foremost of these?”

He does not answer immediately, focused on the road as he guides their cart through a deep, water-filled rut. When he does speak, he does so without looking at her. “A piece of each, I think. My grandfather and grandmother were Irish—I know the hatred and anger that your people held for England, but I will warrant you that proximity makes hatred burn all the brighter, for no one hates the English like the Irish. And yet…in the flame of their fervor, I rebelled by seeking tolerance, or at least a kind of…weary acceptance.”

“That,” she says immediately, “is much more the position taken by most of my father’s people.”

“But not you,” he replies just as quickly, and turns to give her the sort of smile that she would expect to see from a man who loves Silver. It is sharp, bright, and conspiratorial.

She thinks she would like to love him in her own way.

“No,” she agrees. “Not me.”

He nods. “As to my own ambitions…I certainly aspired to a life greater than my grandfather’s, or my father’s. I was not blind to England’s cruelty, even then, but I accepted it as an unchangeable fact of life. I accepted patriotism and service to be the only means by which anyone from my social status gained advancement. These are the reasons for which I pursued a career in the Navy. Once there, however, the third and final motivation revealed itself.

“There was…a man.” Flint falls silent for a long time, and when he speaks again his tone is pained. “A man I thought of as a father, more than that which had been lost to me by death. He was my mentor and my patron. I believe that he loved me, but that was not enough to prevent him from betraying me in the most base way imaginable. He called me a monster, and if such a thing requires a date then _that_ was the moment that Captain Flint was born.

“This man, Admiral Hennessey, knew me uncommonly well. He warned me of a darkness I carried inside that, if left unchecked, might consume me. In this he did not err. When those checks placed on me by a civilized society faded away…”

Here he pauses and falls silent for a long moment. Their cart rolls on through the woods.

“It has not occurred to me before this very moment,” he says, “that I clung to those parts of society that provided for me a steady hand. A rein on my darker instincts. In that respect I represent a fourth man whom Thomas failed to imagine: a man self-aware of his darkness who chooses to channel that monstrosity into means more acceptable to civilization.”

She replies: “Or perhaps you are a fifth—the man who chooses to channel that darkness into means of saving those who civilization deems monstrous.”

He looks at her, then, and it’s as though he clawed his way onto the shoreline at her feet and drew breath from her very mouth. He appears insensible to anything but her, such that she instinctively reaches out to place her hand over his on the reins.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes.”

They ride on. Erik wakes himself, seeming oblivious to the way the landscape of his world has changed in his absence, and offers his place in the cart to Madi. She accepts—Silver kept her up quite late—but finds herself unable to sleep. Instead she watches the branches of tall fir trees move by overhead, so unlike the lush, dripping trees of the Caribbean.

 _A tether_ , she had once said to Silver; but for whom?

-o-

The camp is both as she feared and as she hoped. These are not people battered from slave ships who remember the open skies and clean grass of their homelands; these are not people who seized weapons and with it, their freedom. Many of them have only ever known slavery. Many look at her like she is a danger to them.

She has seen this look before. She understands. To know the whip and chain is to know suffering, but it is _known_. There will always be the question: what is worse than this? What new suffering will I endure, if I seek to change my fortunes?

And yet they have done so, without the promise even of a hidden settlement, for the first freemen arrived here not certain whether the Delaware would give them refuge, a new chain, or simply kill them. Those first people stand apart from the others even as they stand amongst them, and they look at her not with fear but the sharp examination of those weighing that endless question.

Several leaders of the Delaware are there, as well. She had expected them to look something like the Taíno people of Jamaica, and certainly they bear a passing resemblance, but their faces are painted with black streaks and sharp patterns. They wear thick animal skins and look a great deal warmer than the freemen shivering through their thin cotton. They watch her, too, and theirs is an entirely different question: will they risk the lives of their own people to shield these refugees? What price can be offered to offset that risk?

She stands next to Erik, who clears his throat and begins his address to the Delaware.

-o-

It is a night and a day of hard work, meeting with the Delaware leaders then sitting among the freemen. Many have stories to share, and these must be heard. There is a crudely-made loghouse with a thatched roof, a structure somewhere in design between a hut and a Christian home. Inside, the fire burns low and covers them with smoke, while the warmth of several dozen bodies provides far more comfort. They sleep in rows on mats, the few blankets they brought with them in their flight having worn out quickly. The eyes of many light up at the sight of the sewing kit and cloth that Erik presents.

Several speak to her in Yoruba, their tongues faltering at first but growing more confident. She thinks of her father. _This is how they will wipe us out for good_ ; but all around her in the cramped loghouse, they crawl from their graves.

She sleeps there with them. It is a miserable night: too cold and the bite of fleas. She will need to clean herself thoroughly when they return home—but she will have a home to return to. Tonight, she must suffer with them.

She wakes to the sound of children screaming and bolts up. The inside of the log house is dark, lit only by cracks in its walls where the logs lie awkwardly against one another; someone has gone around and stuffed the tattered remains of old blankets in every hole as far up as they could reach. Several women sit around the smoldering remains of the fire, wrapping fish in leaves. Outside, children continue to scream as they play.

One of the women around the fire watches Madi as she calms herself. “Are you hungry?” she asks.

Madi shakes her head but joins their huddled group as they dig cooking pits in the coal. The fish is large and meaty, nothing like the slender kinds to which she is accustomed. Their flesh is dappled on the sides with many colors.

“Trout,” says a thin woman with sharp eyes, who calls herself Lisbet and speaks with the Prussian accent of her former masters. “The Delaware showed us how to catch them in the rivers.”

“The Delaware?” says another woman. “I thought it was your great hunter, Lapowan, who taught you, and then you taught the rest of us.”

Lisbet blushes as the others jibe. This is apparently a favorite subject of gossip. “Who is Lapowan?” Madi asks, perfectly willing to play the role of dunce.

“He is a hunter,” Lisbet answers.

“Her man,” one of the other women adds. “He shaves the front of his head but wears the back long, all the way to his hips. Oh, she loves his hair! You see those beads she wears across her head? He’s taken Lisbet to be his wife.”

“Has he?” Madi asks. It would change things significantly if the Delaware began to see the freemen—and women—as members of their own families.

Lisbet touches the string of pale, long beads that rest against her hairline. “He has not called me his wife,” she says slowly. “I don’t know what it means to him, exactly, but he teaches me things, and he brings me fish.”

“Many unions have been founded on far less,” Madi observes, and all seated around the campfire nod in murmured agreement.

Still, Lisbet’s fingers fret at the beads. “I had a husband before. Gregor. He was Master Felix’s butler. Master Felix allowed us to be married, even paid for a priest, but then a few years later—he sold Gregor to a merchant in Prenzlau. When I learned he meant to bring me here, I thought—but I did not run, then. I was too afraid of what he would do. It was only when he lay on his deathbed that I ran. Gregor is still in Prenzlau, maybe. If he’s alive.”

Madi extends a hand and waits for Lisbet to grip her fingers. She asks, “Did Gregor love you?”

Lisbet’s eyes fill. “Yes. And I him.”

“Would you want him to find a new wife, wherever he is?”

“Yes.”

“Then I must believe that he would want the same for you. To seek joy is the right of every living creature, and this place—here, now—is where, by no design of your own, you must seek it.”

Lisbet smiles through her tears. Across the fire, one of the other women meets Madi’s eyes and nods her approval.

When Madi goes outside, she realizes that there are far more children in the encampment than were there last night. Darting between the tents and huts that will stand empty until the winter cold passes are the children of freemen and Delaware. They appear to be playing some game with sticks and a ball, and as with all childhood games, it transcends the barrier of language. Erik lopes among them, surprisingly dexterous on his crutch.

She stands for some time, watching.

-o-

The sun barely escapes the grasping branches below, and once it completes its poor showing, Madi and Erik depart for Mr. Sauer’s farmstead. Fortunately, Erik has found his way there before at this hour, and leads her along a faint trail through the woods. Madi carries the lantern. “We’ll make fair time, miss,” Erik comments. “Usually it’s just me—a Delaware boy led me away the first time and I was…I don’t know the English, pardon, but I had a cloth over my eyes.”

“‘Blindfold,’” Madi tells him. “In Yoruba it is ‘afọju.’”

“Afọju,” Erik repeats. His accent improves every day. “They didn’t quite trust me yet, but Mr. Sauer has been giving them grain for years.” He pauses. “There was a woman, several years ago, who Mr. Sauer helped escape the same way we have. She came to the tribe and the Delaware chieftain took her for his wife.”

Madi starts to glance over at him, but the unevenness of the ground under her feet necessitates her full attention. The free encampment is about half a mile removed from the Delaware village—close enough for curious Delaware children to bridge the distance, but encircled by a high wooden wall. Other than the representatives she met today and the children she saw playing in the encampment, she has not seen any others from the tribe—certainly not someone who looked like her.

“Is she still alive?” she asks.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her, only heard stories from the children. I think…I think she must be, for them to be helping us as much as they are. And I think I’ve seen her children among the Delaware.”

It would certainly explain things, if the bond that Madi imagined between Lisbet and her hunter Lapowan already exists, but even more powerful than Madi could hope for. To find an ally so highly placed…

She wonders, not for the first time, how her father managed to do this for so long, alone, with no one at his side. She wonders this and she reaches out silently to curl her hand around Erik’s elbow. His uneven steps falter a moment and she hopes that he does not misinterpret the gesture as pity for his condition; but then he resumes and they walk on together through the gathering night.

By the time they arrive at the Sauer farmstead it is full darkness, but the front window glows with light. Flint opens the door before they even knock and ushers them in directly to the fireside.

“How did it go?” he asks.

Erik launches into a full report, which includes a vivid description of the game he played with the children, including its many rules. “It was quite bloodthirsty, sir. You would have approved.”

Flint smiles but says, “Mind yourself a bit, and watch the others. One dead or injured child might be forgiven among the Delaware, but were a freeman’s child the perpetrator, it could bring the whole thing crashing down.”

Erik nods with the utmost seriousness and Madi smiles into the cup of milk that Flint warmed for them on the fire. “Is Mr. Sauer already asleep?”

Flint nods. “You’ll have to forgive his hours—he’ll be up at four bells, most likely, and ready to fistfight God Himself.”

“I look forward to meeting him,” Madi says, “and thanking him for his generosity.”

“In my experience, you should restrain yourself. He tends to view all this as some kind of sacred calling, and begrudges any signs of gratitude.”

They retire shortly themselves: Erik in particular is exhausted by their trek through the woods. It will be best, she muses, to keep him in the city and set up a meeting point here, or at another farmstead. Were he attacked whilst on foot, either by slavemasters who followed him from the city or simple thieves looking for an easy quarry, he would almost certainly be killed. Could they purchase him a horse or another pony? How would they house the animal?

So many plans. So many concerns and hopes, and so much riding on them all. She presses a kiss to Erik’s forehead, then smiles as he blushes and ducks into the small bedroom he’ll share tonight with Flint.

Instead of following, Flint escorts her to her room. “Does Mr. Sauer have a wife?” she asks.

“Yes, in Hesse. He intends to bring her here, soon, along with his son.” He gestures at the building around them with its empty rooms waiting to be filled. “He has assured me that his wife is even more sympathetic to our cause than he.”

He says it in just such a way to assure _her_ that, while hopeful, he does not intend to place full faith in that assessment until he meets the woman herself. Madi nods to show her appreciation of this judgement and gestures for him to follow her into her room. After a moment’s surprised hesitation, he does so, though awkwardness wraps itself around his shoulders.

“I wanted to ask you,” Madi says quickly, not wishing for him to mistake her intentions, but then is uncertain how to proceed with her thoughts. They stand for a long moment in silence, lit only by the wavering candle in Flint’s hand, while she gathers herself. This room is also small, but already hung with curtains. The bed has a thick quilt that Madi is all to eager to wrap around herself. Yet still she hesitates.

Finally she says, “I was thinking about my father. For the obvious reasons, of course, but also—after the Walrus landed on the shores of our island, I had my men pull Silver from the prisoners’ cage. I had heard something of his story already, from my father—he often sent intelligence reports along with those Maroons whom he could rescue from the account before they were sold. Of Silver, he made mention but twice: first as an unnamed thief of little consequence who had posed some frustration to the plans of those more important to himself.”

Flint snorts hard enough that the candle in his hand wavers. Madi smiles then continues. “The second time was after Charlestown. He said the thief whom he had so quickly dismissed had shown uncommon devotion to his crew, and thus saved their lives, becoming quartermaster in the process.”

“Including your father’s,” Flint muses. “Did you plan to spare him, as recompense?”

“No. He would have died with the rest of you, had matters gone differently. He was a pirate and a Christian man—just because he was loyal to his crew did not mean he would show us the same consideration. But I was curious. I believed my father to be an excellent judge of character, and for him to have been proven so wrong was…notable.”

“Your father’s judgement is not what you want to discuss right now, is it?”

“No. I wish to discuss my own. When I spoke to Silver that first time, I found him highly intelligent and manipulative, but too obviously so for his own good. He sought to sow conflict in the camp, in order to save his own life and the lives of his men. I saw this, and thought that I would not make the same mistake as my father.”

Flint tilts his head. “Do you believe you did?”

“I am asking you that.”

“I don’t think I understand.” But then his expression smooths with realization. “Are you…? Asking me if Silver seduced you in order to manipulate your sentiments for his advantage?”

At her hesitant nod, he sighs and strokes his goatee. “I think that if you ask both me and Silver that question, and somehow were assured of our full honesty, you would have two very different answers. What I can tell you is this: when first you made your intentions known to him—and recall, you did make yours known first—he came to me in a state of some agitation and demanded that I give my opinion on the subject. I said that you seemed unlike the kind of woman who might punish a man if spurned and that he should not believe himself our only means of reaching an accord with the Maroon camp. So far as I could tell, he took my advice to heart. Why are you asking this now?”

“There may be a woman in the Delaware village. Erik says that she is the chieftain’s wife, but first she was a free woman escaping her chains.”

Flint’s eyebrows rise. It’s clear he grasps the implications of this revelation. And yet he waits, watching her face.

“It does not feel so different,” she says. “And perhaps it is. Perhaps I am simply looking for another reason to mistrust his sincerity…as if he should need any help with that. But I think of him, starving and desperate, and I do not know how he was not afraid, how I…did not take a man to my bed who would have done anything, would have let _me_ do anything, in order to save the lives of his crew. He let Vane’s crew hack off his leg instead of betraying them, why would he not endure similar torture at my hands? I could have ordered him dead with a word—he even told me so, when we first met, and yet I—”

She cuts off as Flint steps closer to her. His face has creased with concern and he rests one hand on her shoulder for a moment before sliding it around to her back and pulling her against him.

Madi realizes of a sudden that she is weeping. She wraps her arms around Flint’s waist and presses her face against his shoulder.

“I’m all right,” she tells him, between sobbing breaths.

“I know,” he says. He rests his chin atop her skull.

“It’s only that I’m tired,” she says, and hopes that he hears the meaning that she, in her shame, cannot speak aloud.

Since she was young, she has known that she would be the one who tends, not the one who is tended to.

Flint holds her tight until she can master herself, then steps back and bids her a murmured good night. She has never appreciated his brusque nature more: exhaustion strikes her from her feet and her head has barely touched her pillow before she is asleep.

-o-

Mr. Sauer is exactly as she imagined him to be: short, round, and mustachioed with a booming voice. She hears him before she sees him and is put in mind of the odd wind instrument that she saw being played once in Bristol. It had resembled a sack more than anything musical, but the sound it produced was truly extraordinary in volume.

Upon her appearance in the downstairs room, however, Mr. Sauer snaps to attention and becomes the absolute model of decorum. He stands when she enters and offers her tea. He bows very slightly upon being properly introduced. Even Thomas would be hard-pressed to exceed his mannerly address to her—though to be fair, she and Thomas had not stood on ceremony for long.

Considering _how_ they met, it’s impressive they managed it at all.

They have precious little time with which to converse, as they are expected back in Philadelphia tonight. Silver warned her of how Thomas worries in Flint’s absence, and the dark places to which his mind plummets. She would have advised Flint to return early instead of waiting for them at Mr. Sauer’s farmstead, except that she is fully aware that Silver intended the warning to include _him_ as well, and his worry for her. He still hesitates to express such sentiments outright, as if she has somehow forgotten how he betrayed her trust and, by mentioning his own fear for her well-being, he will remind her and she will scorn him anew.

She has not forgotten. Nor is she blind to the ways in which he might sabotage their efforts, here. She and Flint are united in purpose once again; the last time that occurred, it frightened Silver so badly that he tore all their lives apart with his bare hands.

For most of the ride back to Philadelphia, the sun is in their eyes. Mr. Sauer gifted them with sausage and cheese for their journey, though the cheese proves too pungent for Madi’s nose. Erik wolfs it down with great enthusiasm. “Tastes like the cheese Da used to buy.”

“One day,” Madi tells him, “I will find someone to make you gbegiri.” She is not a great cook: though she spent time helping in the Maroon camp, she does not remember the recipes well, and has no idea where she might find the proper ingredients in the colonies. Certainly, she knows how to prepare many English dishes, the result of her time with Silver in the Bristol inn, but she would rather cut off her own hands than serve Erik any kind of English food.

Flint squints at her in the dazzling sun, as if he hears her unspoken thoughts. If he does, he makes no defense of his country’s cuisine. Fortunate, since it is objectively indefensible.

Thick clouds move over the horizon as they travel, and the day grows bitterly cold. “Lucky this didn’t happen yesterday,” Flint comments grimly, and urges poor Benjamin to a trot. Madi draws her coat around her tight.

When the sky opens, though, it is not rain that falls on their heads.

The first winter they’d spent in Bristol, Silver had shaken her awake one cold January morning and taken her outside. White had dusted the rooftops and gathered on the window ledges. Every exhalation had drifted like smoke from her mouth. The beauty and wonder had not lasted long, of course, as the city woke up around them and wagon wheels turned the snow to dirty slush while merchants cursed the cold under their breath. To someone raised on a deserted island, the racket of an English city proved almost unbearable.

Here, though, nothing disturbs the falling snow. Despite the very real danger, Flint slows the cart and they huddle together, gazing upwards. Snowflakes catch on Madi’s eyelashes and she cannot help but laugh, blinking it away. Erik grins at her.

She thinks of the encampment, hoping they will be warm enough tonight, and feels a pang of guilt for taking pleasure in what might bring them pain—but no, no. She will not begrudge herself this. She is flesh and blood, and she is human. She cannot bear the entire world on her shoulders all day, every day, without being slowly ground to dust. Were she her mother, surrounded by her own people, she might have born it upright; but her path has taken her far from home, to places and people her mother could not even have imagined for her, and she cannot serve from an empty vessel. She smiles at Flint and winds her fingers with Erik’s.

Night closes in fast, but just as she is beginning to worry, lights shine ahead. The guards do little more than wave their cart through, and once inside, the buildings shield them from wind. Everywhere, children dart through the streets, flinging snowballs at one another. They will go back to their houses tonight and lay their heads on soft pillows instead of flea-ridden mats, but Madi cannot help smiling at them, too.

There are lights in every room of the house. It’s instantly visible the moment Flint steers their cart onto their street. Maria-Elena must be stoking the fires in every room in preparation for their return. She reminds Madi very much of Eme: ferocious love tempered by endless pragmatism, growing like a flower between cobblestones.

Two figures sit on the steps outside their front door. They rise as the cart approaches. Thomas does indeed look pale with worry, but smiles up at Flint as he draws Benjamin to a halt. Erik is already swinging down from the back of the cart to accept a clap on the shoulder and a murmured greeting from Silver. Madi and Flint are slower to follow, stiff with the cold and the long voyage. Rebekah materializes, seemingly from the night itself, and offers Madi a hand down. They still need to return the cart to Flint’s shop, and Benjamin to his stabler, but Flint has taken Thomas by the elbow and pulled him into the darkness around their front door. Madi does them the courtesy of averting her eyes from their tender embrace.

Silver is watching her. Once, on an island, he had raced to embrace her and she sees in his face the desire to do so now; but he grips his own reins and simply stands with one hand on Erik’s shoulder and the other tight on his crutch.

He loves her. He _loves her_. For so long she had scorned that part of herself that whispered, _to be loved so wholly by another person was enough_ ; with this new purpose not set before her, she might still. But here, now: it is enough.

She steps forward into his arms and lets herself love him back just as fiercely.

Notes:

-Madi is reading Dante’s _Inferno_.

-The question of where the tradition of Thanksgiving Day actually started in the US is, apparently, a subject of some intense debate. Don’t know why we had to beef about Thanksgiving, but here we are. I went with the Virginia option; sorry Massachusetts. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving#Debate_about_the_nation's_first_celebrations>

-The Jewish Maroons that Madi remembers from her youth were descendants of the Jews of Bilad el-Sudan, who lived along the interior of the Western coast of Africa. This appears to have been a mix of Maghrebi and Sephardic Jews, fleeing the Romans in ancient times and the Spanish Expulsions during the 14th and 15th centuries. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Jews#Bilad_el-Sudan>

\- ẹfọn: mosquito in Yoruba

-The grass that Madi mentions is _Cymbopogon nardus_ or citronella grass. In addition to being an insect repellant it is sometimes used in hoodoo holy practices. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymbopogon>

-Silver’s comment about La Florida and King Charles: while Florida was a Spanish colony, King Charles II of Spain (he of the wildly incestuous lineage) declared in 1693 that any African slaves in the British colonies who fled South and converted to Catholicism would be freed. This created an underground railroad from the British colonies to Florida and hence to the Caribbean. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Florida#Missions_and_conflicts>

-A pę ko to jęun, ki ję ibaję = “The person that eat late, will not eat spoiled food.” Madi is telling Silver to be patient and wait for her return. Read more: <https://www.legit.ng/1199266-yoruba-proverbs-idioms.html>


End file.
